


gennesaret

by Askance



Series: Mashiach [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, M/M, Mild Implied Incest, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stigmata
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s pacing, and Sam wishes he would stop. The floors in this motel are cheap and warped and every connection of his foot to the plywood under the carpet makes a sound like a hammer ringing dully.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gennesaret

“You knew the whole time.”

“Dean—”

“You _knew._ ”

He’s pacing, and Sam wishes he would stop. The floors in this motel are cheap and warped and every connection of his foot to the plywood under the carpet makes a sound like a hammer ringing dully. _Thump. Thump._ It puts Sam in mind of carpentry and he shudders.

Cas stands, silent, a little ways away, looking between them.

“You knew,” Dean says, pulling at his mouth, “and you didn’t tell me?”

“Dean.” Sam leans forward, exasperated, cradling his forehead in one of his bandaged hands.

“Four and a half _weeks,_ Sam—here I am, going out of my mind trying to figure out what the hell this is, and then Cas shows up and gives me a word and you sit there and you say _yeah, I know?_ Four and a half weeks and you didn’t think to tell me you already had a name to put to this crap?”

“Because I knew you’d react like this,” Sam says, lifting his head, hands falling open. Dean swallows hard at the sight of them and keeps pacing. “I knew you’d throw an almighty fit and the first thing you’d do would be to dive for a—a book, or a spell—”

“You’re damn right!” The noise of Dean’s feet is unbearable. “You’re damn right that’s what I’m gonna do.”

Sam looks at Cas for help and Cas averts his eyes to the floor.

“Stigmata,” Dean says, almost spitting it, as if he doesn’t want it on his tongue. “Right? There’s gotta be some hex bag or some Enochian crap to get those things to go away.” He points a poisonous finger at Sam, accusing, and Sam can almost feel his fingernail digging into the wounds in his hands and feet.

Four and a half weeks ago his palms had split open as if cleaved with a spike; two weeks ago his feet had done the same. There is an itch building in his skull that tells Sam what is coming next. And Dean is right—he’s known from the beginning what the word for this is. _Stigmata_ has been a word in his vocabulary since high school, since he’d first begun to drift towards Stanford and the hopes and dreams of normal people, ever since freshman year of college where theology books had found their way into his backpack alongside books of civil law, ever since he first saw it in a footnote and had found himself enraptured by the beauty of the thing itself, and he hasn’t told Dean because he knows that Dean will hate it, and so far he’s proving himself correct. Dean hates it because all he can see are the wounds, and he has always abhorred the sight of little-brother-blood.

Dean turns to look at Cas, pulling anxiously at his lower lip, eyebrows raised in a sharp directed question: _well?_

Cas looks at him and says, quite plainly, “I don’t know how to get rid of them.”

“Then we’ll find a way.” Dean’s voice is firm, and damn him, he starts pacing again. Sam can see his attention pulling inward, can almost see the cogs in his brain clicking over.

“Dean,” Cas says—he glances momentarily at Sam with something like sympathy—“there may not _be_ a way.”

“We’ll work something up, invent something if we have to, and we’ll get rid of those things—”

“I don’t want to get rid of them.”

Dean freezes mid-stride; he turns his head to face Sam with a look of incredulity sitting around his mouth. Cas turns his eyes down at the floor.

“You don’t— _what_?”

Sam closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I don’t want to get rid of them,” he says. “They’re not—they’re not meant to be _gotten rid of_.”

Dean looks betrayed, as if Sam has punched him in the face, or the gut. Sam watches his eyes drop like a bouncing marble from where Sam’s hands rest on his thighs to his bare feet against the warped floor, and there’s so much disgust in them at what they see that Sam feels sick. He himself can’t look at the wounds without feeling something hot and blissful in his throat, can only stare at them in reverence, and it feels so awful to be looked at like a freak again, like something unfixable.

This is something that doesn’t need fixing. But Dean can’t see that.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dean says, with a sort of mirthless half-laugh. Sam wishes he would sit down, or at the very least stop looming over him like this.

“I don’t want them to go away,” Sam says. “They’re—”

“A fucking curse,” Dean shouts, “or worse! You’ve been bleeding constantly for almost a month, Sam—it might be slow but eventually you’re gonna—”

“Will you stop talking for _five minutes_?” Sam shouts back, the loudest his voice has been since this started, and by instinct he starts to rise to his feet before pain spurts in lightning bolts up his legs and he sits back down again on the edge of the bed. “Will you maybe, for once in your _life_ , let me think about my own situation in peace?”

Dean’s mouth closes like a steel trap, and he stares at Sam for a long time before finally he drifts sideways and sits down heavily in the armchair next to the nightstand. Cas, quiet and watchful, remains where he is.

“These are _my_ hands and _my_ feet,” Sam says, his words coming out ragged and upset. He draws his palms up across his legs as if keeping them close to his heart where no one can snatch the holes away. He rubs anxiously at the skin beneath his eyes and turns his head to the wall. “They’re my decision to make.”

“Sammy—”

“Dean,” Cas says, from across the room. Dean goes quiet again.

Sam tries to remember how to breathe normally, ducks his head and covers his eyes to think.

He’s known this conversation was coming, at some point, once someone had told Dean what this was and lit the fire beneath him to fix everything. Sam has been dreading this since it became clear to him what he was becoming—a stigmatic, some kind of holy cripple, a word and a breathless fleeting dream he might have had at nineteen years old before the intrusion of life and the world had pulled it away. He knows that Dean won’t understand if he explains. He won’t understand even if Cas explains, in his clinical way, the mechanics of a blessing like this.

What can he say? What words will possibly make this right for Dean? He can’t say, _this is a miracle._ He can’t say, _I don’t know why, but somehow—somehow there’s a power up there who has looked at me and said, “I’ve seen you, Sam, I’ve seen the road you’ve been on and the things you’ve given up, and I’ve heard you pray your heart out every day of your life since you first knew how to fold your hands, and I forgive you for the lives you’ve taken and the wrong turns you’ve made, because (somehow, despite everything) you are precious to me, and there is the spark of goodness in you.”_

He can’t say, _God reached down and touched my hands and feet and said, “Here is your reward for faith; I love you, and I choose you,” for some reason that I can’t figure out because of how nothing I am. And here I am, bleeding, and I love it, and I want to bleed dry if I can, if He’ll let me, because—somehow, somehow, I’m holy, Dean._

_I have never been holy before._

He can’t say any of that because none of it will make sense to Dean, slumped in the chair next to the nightstand. Dean can’t see the goodness in the hurt. Dean can’t understand the peace these four and a half weeks have given Sam—has only washed the wounds and brushed them off, has never seen Sam lying there in bandages near in tears because he can feel that the road is shortening, and is realising that he’s running the home stretch, and that the finish line is carved in golden ecstasy and he has never wanted any prize more. Dean can’t understand what this means to him.

That God has smiled on him, finally, and absolved him, and given him what he has always wanted. Redemption. Proof—

Proof that he can be saved.

“Sammy,” Dean says, though not with anger now; he leans forward in his seat, anxiety quashed down by the sad bow in his little brother’s shoulder, the way it’s obvious that Sam is fighting to find the right words.

“I’m blessed,” Sam says, and chokes on it—saying it aloud makes it so real, so true that it’s blinding, like a firework on his tongue. He looks down into his palms, the faint red marks of blood seeping into the bandages. “And—Dean, I can’t—”

He collects himself, swallows. Cas moves quietly closer.

“I can’t—explain to you what this means, and I can’t make it right in your head,” Sam says, finally managing to draw his eyes up to meet his brother’s, blinking Dean into focus through the sharp hot haze of his tears. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t cry, but he’s overwhelmed with what he knows he can’t say, what will fall on deaf ears. “But it’s _mine,_ Dean. These are mine, and I _want_ them.”

He watches Dean’s throat work, and feels the sadness in Dean’s voice like a bullet when he speaks.

“They’re gonna kill you, Sammy,” he says, and there it is—the real fear—not the anxiety of misunderstanding something, not anger at the secret Sam kept, the word for the affliction—always and forever it comes back to this, to Dean losing him..

Sam understands. But the fear of death in Dean is the fear of a little boy who watched his mother burn to ashes on the ceiling of a nursery and it’s time, Sam thinks, it’s time for Dean to realise that everything dies, and some things die because the dying is good.

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

He pulls at his eyes and a few stray tears slip warmly down his face. His hands and feet are aching. The ache is exquisite.

“I don’t want you to break your back trying to fix this,” he says, finally, after a long time—looking at Dean, who is sinking into himself like sand. “It’s not something you fix. It’s mine. And it’s—holy, and I know you can’t see it, and you might not ever see it, but—I choose it. I own it. It’s mine.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” Dean asks. He is growing quieter, hoarser, by the second, becoming the little boy who balks at death—looking at Sam’s hands and feet not with disgust now but with fear. His leg jars up and down with nerves, heel thudding on the carpet, _thump. Thump._ “Just sit back and—let you go?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do. I just—”

He takes a deep breath; focuses for a moment on the four points of pain, the way they pulse and throb in time with his heart.

“I just don’t want to be alone,” he says at last.

Dean drops his head.

“It’s going to kill me and I can’t promise that it’ll make sense, but I just—I need you to trust me that I want this, and—and not leave me alone,” he says, and then he’s done; he doesn’t know what else to say; he can’t promise to make them fishers of men, these two, Dean and Castiel, bearing witness to his agony-salvation, but he can ask them to follow him, at least until that ecstatic finish line. It isn’t far. He isn’t asking them to follow him to the ends of the earth—only to the ends of his veins.

Sam thinks that as long as Dean is with him, as long as Cas is with him, whether or not they can understand or bear it, he can shoulder this. He can make it to Calvary, or wherever he’s meant to waste away. And the dying will be good.

It’s a long time before Dean moves from his chair, and slowly comes to sit beside his brother, and with gentle resignation pull him into his arms; Castiel’s hand appears on Sam’s shoulder where it shakes. None of them speak, but Sam has asked and they can’t well say no to him now. He’s past the point of being left behind.

Sam’s head is resting on Dean’s chest, their bodies rocking just a little back and forth, when the skin of his head begins to break, a quiet crown of thorns pushed down to rest upon his brow.

**Author's Note:**

> This series belongs in part to Casey, whose contributions can be read [here](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com/fanfiction). 
> 
> The Lake of Gennesaret, or the Sea of Galilee, is where James and John, sons of Zebedee, laid down their work to follow Christ.


End file.
